Opinion: The Graduate System Crisis

By Tina Lee
Staff Writer

In a New York Times Op-Ed entitled “End the University as We Know It,” chairman of the Columbia religion department Mark C. Taylor voiced his opinion about graduate level education. He described doctoral programs producing a product for which there is a diminishing demand for subfields of esoteric subfields of study.

The rapidly rising costs for obtaining this education can easily mount to over $100,000 in student loans. Graduate students often have to be subjected to “subsistence living:” earning modest stipends for running laboratories and teaching conferences. The secret is that universities need to operate on the low-cost labor provided by graduate students instead of employing enough full-time faculty to provide adequate education to ever-growing undergraduate populations.

Emmanuel Kant, in his 1798 work The Conflict of the Faculties, planted the seeds of what would become the modern university. He conceived of higher education as “handl[ing] the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.” What has happened over the decades is the rise of a version of this “division of labor” model. Faculty members within a department specialize in their own subfields of limited knowledge that is often too irrelevant for genuinely important problems.

Modern universities need to restructure their graduate programs by first trashing the division-of-labor model. The separation of departments has become obsolete and must be replaced with an interdisciplinary curriculum taught by an adaptive network of faculty members. Responsible teaching and scholarship requires faculty to collaborate with industry leaders/CEOs, politicians and entrepreneurs in order to create graduates for which there is a position to be filled. The gap between academia and industry will be most effectively bridged by a government educational agency. This third-party, made up of “trustees,” can create guidelines for adaptations to graduate programs according to changes in the labor market changes.

If any principle shall be followed, it is the importance of restructuring higher education to foster evolution is necessary for the rapidly changing economics and technological advances of the twenty-first century.

Tina Lee is a third-year pharmacy student.